If you’ve tried the alpha, you may have seen that you can rate your host from 1 to 10 along with the written reference aspect. How do you feel about this kind of anonymous element? Does it work for you? Is assigning a number rating okay? I think it does the job, for now.
One thing I think though is we should make it clear that you’re rating your experience, not the person themselves.
Edit: Want to add that I think we should clarify what a “10” experience is versus a “1” experience.
10 = One of the best experiences I’ve had
1 = One of the worst experiences I’ve had
So this is a bit premature, but having done a bit of user research I have some thoughts on how references and community standing is going to look like.
Instead of references, it’s going to be a “Guestbook” section. Anyone who has interacted with you as a host, surfer, event-goer or on hangouts can leave you a nice note (or not-so-nice but polite) and names/profiles are completely visible. You can also reply to the notes. It will also be “amendable” by the note-giver in the form of replies.
Incorporating an aggregated, anonymous rating system. This is COMPULSORY if you’ve hosted or surfed with someone, and can ONLY be done if there is a confirmed interaction (formal acceptance of stay). Think Airbnb-style star ratings for cleanliness etc.
It will be on the scale of 1-5 stars, for the following:
• I felt safe with my host/surfer
• I was satisfied with the interaction (including this so that people will be CLEAR on the kind of hosting/surfing experience they’re expecting during the requesting/messaging process)
• Anything else important anyone can think of
This rating will only appear/be adjusted on a user’s profile after every 5 confirmed interactions, so that it’s an aggregate of them and it’s harder for creepos to pinpoint who rated them negatively. Making it an aggregate also makes sure that a user is not mistakenly rated as a creep from a single interaction, perhaps arising from a mismatch in personality.
I toyed with the idea of baking these ratings into community standing, but I feel like it needs to be more direct and upfront as both a form of feedback to the person with bad ratings, or a clear warning to vulnerable surfers.
ONLY the ratings will be baked into a user’s community standing score. The community standing score should be a mix of many weighted factors, including your verification level, participation level, etc. so these ratings wouldn’t break your standing per se. Like maybe I’d still hang out with you or invite you to an event, but based on your safety rating I might not want to request a stay with you. And that’s okay.
I like the idea of 5 stars rather than 10. 10 seems like too much when you are kind of rating a person! I know personally it would probably kill me if someone i liked rated me 9/10. Like why 9?! What don’t you like about me?! And then it would become a bit of an insecurity comparing your scores to everyone else (like comparing likes on social media maybe). With 5 I think it could be more like Uber and generally you get 5 unless something actually happens? I know I did see somewhere that you were looking at changing the norm to not have 100% reference ratings which I get, but I also feel like wouldn’t sit that well with how many humans function… like it seems unnecessary to rate anyone down unless they have actually done something wrong. Feels like a popularity contest otherwise.
I love this, for a bunch of reasons! One, when a user deletes their profile, their written references will also be deleted. That’s very unintuitive when at first they were presented like happening on a public area. This way it’s much clearer this is actually part of their profile, just with a guarantee that it’s the original writing of other members.
Then I’d hope it will lead to references being written differently, not in this product review style. Over the last years I got so bored of reading references on cs.
And I think framing it as “guestbook” has potential for much wider application on the site. There could be guestbooks for groups, cities, events… and they can probably even receive editorial attention in the style of the ‘funny negative references’ collection on cs, or ‘sweet notes left by guests’…
If this is complusory and central to the calculated standing, I’d reflect it in the input flow for references. First asking for rating and ticking checkboxes, saving this as the central part of ‘leaving a reference’ and then being presented the option to leave a written part in the guestbook.
Why not present two checkboxes that directly reflect if the exchange was indeed based on a non-transactional understanding:
Excellent suggestions, this is very close to what I’m wishing for. Text entry and score each playing out their strengths.
Is the community score recipe going to be public? I.e. if my score’s lower than I’d expect, can I figure out by myself what’s wrong with it exactly and which of my ways need changing?
When there’s a score of course I’m planning to game it (I’ve got some sort of gambling personality anyway). If necessary by trying to be very excellent to my guests and surfers
I for one think it should be 100% transparent how the community standing score is calculated. Yeah of course people are going to try to game it, but that’s a good thing - you can’t really control what people think of you or anonymously rate you, so you’d have to be on your best behaviour as a user
Honestly, I haven’t yet given much thought into the drawbacks of making everything transparent in terms of algorithms, but it’s going to reduce a lot of angry noise from users when they see they have a low score. They’d be able to clearly see the steps they should take to improve as a coucher. That’s a good thing, right?
For the ultimate predators who are going to find ways to circumvent it (I don’t doubt there are sick people like that out there), there will be other safeguards in place such as reporting - so we can ban them if necessary.
At some point the ultimate predator could just look for more gullible victims instead of caring for their scores. In the end we can only do so and so much and I’m glad we’re aiming high in that. To be better safe than sorry we need to assume the worst sometimes – but not all the time!
Was thinking about this. I think “no sex/no money” is a bit… rough to see. How about these as ratings?
I felt safe with my host/surfer. (Will be baked into community standing score)
My host/surfer wanted to spend time together! (Won’t count in community standing score)
My host/surfer was OK with not spending time together (Won’t count in community standing score)
And in the search filter, to minimise the conflict of expectations between host and surfer, allow a filter that accounts for whether they want to spend time together or not.
My justification behind this is that while I did user research calls, there seemed to be quite a bit of feedback about hosts being unhappy that surfers treated their place like a hotel. At the same time, there are surfers that want to stay with a host because they have things like a job interview nearby, or already have their travel itinerary prepared for the day. Or sometimes hosts are just too busy with their jobs to spend time together with the surfer. All these are basically a mismatch of expectations.
As a tool to address this problem for people who care, a searchable filter for whether a host/surfer wants to hang out could be useful. And these opinions should come from the person who had the interaction with said party.
Alternatively, we can pair this with another feature: allowing hosts/surfers to indicate if they want to hang out or not during the experience, make that filterable, then keep the ratings to two very simple ones:
I felt safe (baked into community score)
I enjoyed the interaction (baked into community score as a form of feedback as to how accurate the host/surfer was in terms of indicating “I want to hangout or not”)
I honestly didn’t think much about hanging out. But I’d wonder if this is quantifiable in a good way, because it also depends a lot on changing circumstances and chemistry.
I thought more about the conversation on dating expectations and what i took away from the discussion so far is that there is a big difference between ‘feeling safe’ and ‘being uncomfortable’. So most of the time, the issue with unwelcome advances or suggestions is not that someone makes you feel unsafe, but that they make the entire experience uncomfortable, because they bring in this implicit expectations. And that in turn puts off women in big numbers and leads to all kinds of subsequent disfunctionalities.
So I think ‘safety’ and ‘genuine understanding/not having implicit expectations’ should be two distinctly visible aspects. so that if a user is rated high in safety, but low on genuine exchange, you get this good visibility that they are not dangerous, but engage with expectations. If ‘feeling safe’ is supposed to be the check on unwelcome advances, I think we’d just repeat the whole issue from cs, that it doesn’t get visible, because it’s only given space as a problem when members put others into genuinely unsafe situations.
That’s a very good point. I think further thought needs to be put into the rating criteria, it’s clearly not that clear cut/explicit. Let me stew on it a little
Envisioning different follow-up protocolls further down the line could also help make the distinction more clear… Like when a member selects ‘unsafe’, they could receive a follow-up dialog/message like “would you want to report this user and let us know why they are not safe to stay with/host?” Whileas if a referenced member hits an overall low rating on ‘having expectations’, they could get a reminder to review community guidelines / pointing out that this platform is based on the value of non-transactional experience.
I don’t think the difference is that big to be honest. Feeling uncomfortable with something is generally a prelude to feeling unsafe. For example if someone made an unwanted move on me out in the city during the day I might feel uncomfortable, but this exact same thing by a host i just met and I am staying the night at his house in a country and culture I don’t know, then I would begin to feel even more uncomfortable, which is due to feeling unsafe. I mean it totally depends on the situation. I just wouldn’t presume that advances on someone aren’t going to to make them feel unsafe. It’s not just feeling uncomfortable about “implicit expectations” as you would with money.
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If ‘feeling safe’ is supposed to be the check on unwelcome advances, I think we’d just repeat the whole issue from cs, that it doesn’t get visible, because it’s only given space as a problem when members put others into genuinely unsafe situations.
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But yes I do agree that this distinction should be made for a check box for this reason
Also this talk of “expectations”- I feel like we can never read another persons mind and the focus should be on how the person made YOU feel, as this is what matters really and you can never really know another persons intentions?.
I just saw the words “rating a person” on my phone and suddenly felt the urge to take a moment to post something here.
First I want to say of course it has to be taken in the real context and I know it is not exactly what was meant and I’m sure none of us appreciate the concept and realise it can still bring something positive to the app. ok.
But…arh, for me it is so terrible, it is so representative about this time, century, whatever. And it feels so so wrong. I think we all need to consider what it deeply means to support this kind of acting. Of course today this is everywhere and it can help us find the best hairdresser or restaurant in town. But here, really at the end, we are talking about judging a human being. Therefor an unknown human being who offers you his home and a red carpet into his intimacy. And I get the rate would be about the experience but… would it be… ? When something is badly rated we mostly think it’s a shitty thing, when something is rated 7,5 out of 10, we think it’s a rather good one but it can be better, blablabla, I believe this feeling , whether we want it or not would applies a bit the same. And this is just wrong and so far away from the soul of hospitality.
Of course i understand that those stars can give a feeling of safety, even though it would still be an illusion though. I mean like every way to comment. 100% safety doesn’t exist when you travel.
And some insisting people or perv, men and women will always find they way here, just because that’s a part of the population. As much as we need to find ways to make them feel not welcome and an efficient banishing system, I don’t think rating stars is a sane solution, nor just a solution.
I think putting clear warnings about the “no sex expected” (maybe in a less rough sentence) is very important though, making it clear.
And I think it’s as well important to remember that sometime people are going to flirt and it can be very beautiful as well. I met a girl 8 years ago who hosted me in Austria via couchsurfing when I was travelling through Europe, then she moved in France to join me and she sits next to me right now as I am typing this because we love each other. This is a couchsurfing gift.
So let’s cheer up as well about the good when we fight the bad
And to finish this messy post, I thing the “ok with hanging out or not” is strange, because I don’t wan’t to feel obliged to hang out with someone I host or the other way around. Sometime I just have no time or I am exhausted but I still want to help out a stranger and this is strange if I am judged about my motivation or availability at that moment. Maybe this is just something that we could share in the messages before hosting to check if both are on the same page about the plan/wishes but not to qualify someone about that. Otherwise this starts to feel like a service like the one you buy and have precise expectations about.
Well, sorry for the mess, keep up the beautiful work.
I absolutely understand your POV that ratings seem to diminish the “soul of hospitality”. Bringing numbers in and rating experiences may seem transactional.
However, if everyone on CS subscribed to the pure “soul of hospitality” concept, there wouldn’t be any worry about being hit on, raped, robbed, etc. As you said, 100% safety doesn’t exist when you travel, and expecting a HUGE community made up of all kinds of people to keep in line based on the “hospitality spirit” is impossible. We also can’t manually address every single bad experience, so tools have to be in place for the community to moderate itself and minimise damage.
Having a direct indication or rating of whether a host or surfer made someone feel unsafe is NOT a cure-all. We never said it would be a magical tool to filter out all perverts. But just because the problem will always exist within a population, doesn’t mean we sit on our fingers and let these problems play out freely.
Just to be clear, these safety ratings are NOT meant to deter dating or flirting during experiences. I’m all for dating people you’ve met through CS after you’ve known them better, your story is very lovely. But your story is not the scenario we are tackling at all. We simply are providing tools for the more vulnerable within a community to make more informed choices on who they choose to interact with. If they wish to subscribe to the “soul of hospitality” concept and connect with every single stranger, that’s their prerogative!
Thank you for your input! As a designer working on this platform, I can assure you we are talking to many different parties to take into account all experiences and views. I refuse to ignore the past experiences of everyone that I have talked to, and the numerous complaints over the years on CS. We are going to, as much as possible, design a safe space for everyone to enjoy themselves.
Of course, you may disagree with rating people, that’s ok - I am 100% open to listening to any other suggestions you may have to improve safety on the platform.
I agree that’s the better approach! @kellyt put the questions in that way as well and I also like they are focused on the positive model!
But then we should maybe be very clear about this perspective and not call it ‘community standing’? To me ‘standing’ invokes more a quality of the particular member (similar to their level of verification) and less the community’s response towards that member.
I also agree with @Valentin that we should stay clear of notions of “rating a person”. Maybe one step is to cap the maximum positive feedback so we don’t suggest a competitive direction?
The community standing score includes other things like level of verification, so it’s precisely a score that reflects the “quality” of a user per se. This is a completely separate thing from the Guestbook and Ratings imo, which I agree should reflect how a person made you feel.
Sorry what do you mean “cap the maximum positive feedback”? Are you referring to the number of comments on your Guestbook?
I mean you go on site x and sort phones by user reviews to buy a new one, you go on site y and look at the 10 best rated restaurants in your neighborhood, but you shouldn’t be able to go on couchers.org and filter for the 10 highest scoring hosts in your vicintiy.
Avoiding this approach to rating is already an intention to fix the ‘super host effect’. On the couchers landing page it says:
Hosts of very different experience levels may have similar scores
But then the score will have to be somehow capped, no? Like the verification indicator.
